The paths we make

This morning I was pondering some things in my life that I want to do differently.  I thought about the habits that I have developed that reflect,  according to brain science (I'm not an expert), neurological pathways that I have formed that reinforce that behavior.  I realized that, in order to make the change I want, I would have to force myself for a while to do things differently -- even "unnatural" to how my mind is now trained -- in order to create new "neural paths," leading to new habits and behaviors.

So, my neural pathways (how I think, recall, react mentally) are shaped by what repeated actions I take. Or how I think is driven by what I do habitually, where my brain is keeping records -- first like lines in the sand, but over time they can harden into long-lasting contours.

Nothing new here, but then I recalled that the brain is not the only aspect of my being where pathways are carved by my actions.

My muscle memory -- my ability to react quickly, even instinctively -- is based on how I train my body.  All athletes, musicians and dancers know this.  How I move and react (and how well) is driven by what I do habitually with my body.  I can still pick up the oboe and finger the solo from Peter and the Wolf, though I have not picked up the instrument for almost 20 years.

My relationships are cultivated by shared experiences over time.  The nature of those experience affects trust between me and others.  So, how I relate is driven by what I do habitually with others.

Even spiritual truths reflect the same pattern -- karma, or "you reap what you so."  The virtues that we uphold and the vices we shun, in their healthiest forms, remind us that what we do and don't do has profound implications for our lives.

So our actions carve pathways in our lives.  Our own history is important, because it accumulates into a path we have carved, patterns that repeat because of those pathways, and even ruts that pull us back into those pathways -- unless we escape those pathways and create new ones.

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There are lots of things that can attract our attention and lead us one way or another.  Our wants and needs for belonging, love, provision, security, pleasure and comfort lead us to do things that could be good or bad for us in the long run.  That is to say, they result in pathways in our lives that we may like -- or may not.  Those pathways may reflect us with no regrets, like a beautiful portrait that shows us beautiful.  But they also may show a portrait we are ashamed of.

I think most of us have pathways that reflect both.

The question for me today is, what pathways am I working on?  And how does what I do today help carve them?  Am I giving myself enough time on the pathways I want to carve out?  Or am I wasting time spinning about and carving up a messy path that I will look back on with regret?

My challenge today is to keep this reality in mind, and not let my wants and needs overwhelm my determination to carve the pathways I want to look back on.  If I embrace that challenge, I am convinced it leads to pathways of peace.

2009 needs a hug

[Drafted but unpublished at the start of 2009...until now]

2008 is over. Thank God! It has been a year that will go down in history -- from the most engaging presidential election in US history to the largest global recession in modern economic history. It was a year that shook us so fundamentally that we actually have elected America's first African American president, are taking global warming seriously and have gotten the world's central banks to cooperate almost immediately. If we are honest, most of us would say that 2008 scared the helll out of us.

Or, at least I hope it did.

For many see a common hellish thread at the root of the situations we now face:

• Arrogance that put the US against the world and led us into a unilateral war that almost bankrupted the world's most formidable nation in less than half a decade;


• Greed that collapsed the financial markets and froze credit so much at even a trillion dollar infusion could not thaw them;


• Lies that stole billions from Madoff's investors, from non-profits to retirees who thought they could reap the rewards of a life played well;


• Hate that straps bombs to the mentally ill and unleashes them in crowded metropolises to take as many lives and instill as much fear as possible;


• Selfishness and near-sightedness that threatens to reconfigure our global ecosystem because of an unwillingness to break our addiction to an energy economy that is overheating our planet and killing species our children will never know.

Despite just living through a year in which these self-inflicted wounds became part of the global zeitgeist, I have found myself looking forward to 2009 not with anger and fear, but with reflection and hope. I am hopeful because, in our darkest time, we seemed to get the message. We seemed to recognize our own culpability in many different areas. And we seemed finally ready to do something about it. Face the problems of corruption head on. Elect a leader that represents our best hopes and not our worst fears.

2009 is in need of the kind of reflection that will make us careful not to repeat the sins of the past. And it is in need of the kind of hope that will lift us out of our circumstance and encourage us to put our shoulder to the plow and get on with the business of fixing what's broken.

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When I consider the "hellish" sources of our current condition, it is easy to look at them from a moralizing point of view. However relevant that may be, I think there is a different viewpoint that is more instructive. It is a viewpoint I learned in graduate school, in a class called System Dynamics. It is a way to look at complex cause-and-effect situations in a way that is straightforward and fairly clinical. Looking at things clinically at this point is helpful, because there is so much emotion bottled up in the issues we face, it is easy to lose focus and clarity on what has happened and what we should do about it.

In this class, our last lecture was on the "Limits to Growth" study done in the 1970s. It looked at the world as a system that was facing its growth limits, possibly for the first time: populations were skyrocketing, fueled by the consumption of seemingly limited resources of food, energy, land, clean water and air. It tried to understand the kinds of outcomes we should be prepared for as a planet, and it tried to give us guidance as to what policies would be more effective in sustaining life on earth as we know it.

Limits to Growth included a model of the world -- a complex Monopoly game, if you will -- that a computer could play out scenarios that showed the outcomes of certain policies. Most of the outcomes were pretty grim -- but the grim ones all had something in common, and differed from the more hopeful outcomes in a very specific way. The grim outcomes all included selfish resource policies -- "I got mine, get your own." In those models, the "greed is good" motto ruled. Interestingly, this motto is the corrupted version of "let the free markets work." (For the record, I believe in the free market, but I also believe in the tragedy of the unregulated commons).

The more hopeful outcomes had different resource policies -- "I am responsible for me, but I'm also partly responsible for us." In a subsequent analysis of the study, one person summed up the policies as "the golden rule." Systems Dynamics researcher Dana Meadows wrote powerfully about the approaches people can take to positively (and negatively) affect a system and bring about significant change. The fact that she recognized things like love as supremely powerful to bring about such change is still fascinating to me. A renowned MIT scientist, she proved that love -- the Golden rule; doing for others, even at your own expense -- is a necessary ingredient in the stability of the world. Her theories were sometimes derided as too radical, but she and her colleagues predicted most of what 2008 wrought -- and why.

Reading Meadows' work brought me back to one of my favorite songs, by one of my favorite artists. Stevie Wonder wrote the song, "Love's in Need of Love Today" to open his breakthrough album, Songs in the Key of Life.





He reminds us:

Love's in need of love today
Don't delay; send yours in right away
Hate's going 'round, breaking many hearts
Stop it please, before it's gone too far.

In 2009, I'm imagining a world with less arrogance, and more humility in US foreign policy; less greed and more giving, prudent investment and trust that will stimulate our economy and lending markets; fewer lies and greater honesty and accountability; less hate and more kindness that overcomes hate; less selfishness and more generosity, far-sightedness and respect for our small place in history.

Let's give 2009 a big hug filled with these things. Each time we do, we move ourselves a little closer to the place where most of us yearn to be.

Are we extinguishing the secrets of our future success?

I just saw the film "The Wild Ocean" at the Mugar Omni IMAX Theater in Boston's Museum of Science. It was a nice documentary, and I enjoyed it along with my wife and daughters. It wasn't the most thrilling film I've seen -- my wife poked me once to stop my snoring -- but it was relaxing and contemplative (maybe too much so after a week of the flu and the business of the Christmas holidays).

The movie was about the oceanic ecosystem off the coast of South Africa, the centerpiece of which are the swarms of sardines that have attracted humans, whales, gulls, sharks, dolphins, seals and other sea creatures for tens of thousands of years (they actually claim over 120,000 years -- but I may have been asleep when they explained the evidence of this). It showed this awesome ballet and interplay of this diverse "community" of beings, and it warned that -- because global warming is changing the coastal sea temperatures, and because of overfishing by humans -- this ecosystem may be destroyed in our lifetimes.

Another sad story of a beautiful example of life's balance and diversity now at risk. And for what? A few extra hors d'oeuvres?

A bigger thought than the sardine ecosystem of South Africa occurred to me at that moment. I began to think about all of the human inventions and designs that are a direct result of nature. I then imagined each of those natural patterns as a hidden secret needed for us to solve the puzzles of life into the future. And I thought through the implications of losing any of nature's wonders.

What if, by losing part of the natural design of the earth, we are destroying the solutions to the problems we and the earth will face in the future? A picture became starkly clear to me: the earth was made up of all the answers we need to live happily here. Yet, when we neglect the earth and all its wonders, we destroy another clue to our future posterity. And, an earth filled with man-made conceptions -- at the expense of the natural -- would leave us with many things we understand, but nothing to extend our understanding. No more clues for the future.

I don't know if this is they way the world really works, but I don't think I'm alone in my thinking. As today was the first day of the New Year, I read the Creation story from the book of Genesis in the Bible. It's account of the creation of man and woman -- after the rest of nature was put in place: day and night, the sky, land and sea, sun, moon, stars, vegetation, fish, birds and animals hit the scene -- was that man and woman were given the responsibility to take care of the place. All these things were here for us to be responsible for.

It seems like, in our race for productivity and comfort, we are acting like college kids who have been lent a beautiful mansion to enjoy, only to end up trashing the place in a night for a keg party that everyone is too hungover to remember what happened.

Maybe this global recession, and our melting polar ice caps, and the barrage of hurricanes and tornadoes and floods, and the possible loss of the sardines off South Africa's coast -- maybe these will wake us up to get back to our first job on this planet -- to take care of it.

Guns and Dogs, Cows and Commons

I grew up in New York City, and I remember the day when Ed Koch announced the "pooper scooper law," whereby dog owners had to clean up the mess made by the dogs walked on city streets and in city parks. There was a $100 fine doled out to violators.

I remember visiting my aunt and uncle in rural Virginia. They farmed about 40 acres, and their dogs were important friends and assistants to my aunt and uncle as they traversed the grounds, from hog pen to chicken coop to the fields where their horses and cows grazed.

My uncle owned guns -- rifles, mostly -- and talked with my Dad about them often. They'd go hunting sometimes. Guns to them were an important part of running the farm, and of protecting my uncle's 40 acres in a town where the police aren't at your beckon call.

My father had rifles in our New York City apartment -- single- and double-barrel shotguns and a deer hunting rifle -- that scared me even to look at until his dying day, at which time my cousin graciously removed them and placed them on his mantle.

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If one were to look at voting patterns in the US for the 2004 national elections, by congressional district, one sees a high correlation between population density and blue-ness (more dense population) or red-ness (more sparse population). And, policies around guns and dogs seem to correlate accordingly. More dense populations favor gun regulation and pooper-scooper laws, while more sparse populations favor gun rights and don't sell many pooper scoopers.

So, my first observation is that in the US today, one's political ideology is largely influenced by population density.

The next question is, why?

Take a look at the impact of shared resources on a population and its views.

When one lives in a world of shared resources -- such as NYCers, who live in mostly shared space -- one's views on society is influenced greatly by the structural interdependence of the population. That is, if I own a $10M Park Avenue town house, it's still connected with Park Avenue. And I don't control Park Avenue. So I am very interested in working with others to ensure that my own home and investment is best served. I am more willing to vote for more cops on the street if it will keep me safe; better transit system, to keep the streets from being clogged with cars and smog; and stronger gun laws, to ensure that the probability is minimized that someone living in close proximity to me could ruin my life with a single bullet.

Conversely, it means that if I live in the rural Southwest, I won't be surprised to see people walking down the street brandishing a firearm -- wild west style (I have never seen this, but friends who live there have described it to me). In that part of the country, this is not seen as a criminal behavior (it certainly would be in NYC -- imagine one on the subway), but responsible protection and a way to keep bad guys in check.

It's not that the Southwesterner or the NYCer have "bad values" around guns; it's that the proximity of people in their every day lives dictates different approaches to social policies. In one Southwest town, the idea of "everyone having a gun so no one gets hurt" might work. In a crowded northeast metropolis, such a policy may not be implementable, and it may have the opposite effect.

I have found "guns and dogs" symbolic of these differences because they are so simple to understand, almost everyone has a gut-level opinion on each, and policy preferences are pretty clear to see in the regional laws enacted around them.

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In 2008, the election was about different issues: the economy (fix it), the war in Iraq (exit), healthcare (cover everyone), education (fix it), foreign policy (restore our image) change and hope (we need these badly) -- with the economy being a dominant factor and the need for change and the yearning for optimism being the consensus cries.

While the axes of the 2004 and 2008 elections seem quite different -- social conservativism vs. pragmatic government intervention -- they have something at their core in common that, I believe, will (and should) define the contrast of at least two national political parties.

This leads me to my second observation, which is a generalization of the first: the goal of political debate is to come to consensus on the nature, size and administration of the "commons."

And, what is a "commons," you may ask?

The commons, in the colonial days in Boston, farmers would bring their cows to a common field to feed -- creating the "cow paths" we now call our roads and streets. The problem was that, while each farmer benefited from being able to have their cattle and horses graze while in town, no one was responsible for the upkeep of the common, and it soon became a mudbowl. The farmers needed to agree to share the burden (i.e., levy a tax) on those who used the commons more, so that those who benefited more would share a greater burden for the upkeep of the commons. Because of this, the Boston Commons still exists today, nearly 400 years later.

Garrett Hardin made popular the discussion of the tragedy of the unregulated commons, in which he argues that the role of regulation (however much it is) is to provide adequate incentives and mechanisms for maintaining the commons.

The question now is, what is in the "commons" for America? Is healthcare in? If so, how much? Foreign relations, for sure -- but what mix military vs. diplomacy? How about a decent education for everyone? Or a financial system that functions in providing mechanisms for savings, insurance and credit -- and eliminates fraud?

As Thomas Friedman reminds us, we live in a world that is hot, flat and crowded. That means we are more interconnected than ever. And our understanding of that interconnectedness -- to other Americans and to other citizens of the world -- is fundamental to the kinds of policies we will set in defining what's in the commons, how big it should be and how it functions. The commons helps us express in policy and economic terms what we believe is the basic standard of living for every American. FDR did this with the New Deal, and it looks like the Obama administration will have to sort this out, too.

When one looks at our political discourse through the lens of "negotiating the commons," it may be helpful for us to find consensus around the things about which we must necessarily agree. Those things will certainly change over time, and the role of our political parties ought to be to represent the balancing points for our nation to thrive and prosper. Polarization and polemics may work in homogeneous, local environments. But in an interconnected, interdependent America, such politics are corrosive. They are like a magnet introduced close to a compass -- one cannot find true north. Rather, as we grow in our maturity understanding the nature of our commons and how to make it work best for our society -- whether in terms of how our free markets operation, what human rights we ensure, and how we engage with other nations -- we give ourselves the best chance to be the America we hope we can be.

Can anyone tell me what "Democrat" or "Republican" mean now?

Disclaimer: I am a self-avowed political neophyte -- not an expert or a pundit of any sort. I hope that this posting is received by the reader as thought-provoking and not polemic or ideological.

What's the difference now between Democrat and Republican? Between liberal and conservative?

Over the past several weeks since the 2008 presidential election, I have heard many Republicans bemoan the fact that George W. Bush did not represent Republican values. At the same time, I hear Karl Rove -- the architect of the "new Republican machine" consistently defend the current administration. Whatever one's views of the Republican party, it is clear that it is a party with an ideology that is in flux -- some would say, in crisis.

At the same time, there are liberal Democrats who have grown frustrated with President-Elect Obama before his first day in office because they see him as not advocating aggressively for their positions -- positions that have been kicked to the curb the last eight years.

Now I'm not a politico, and I would rather not see political parties other than that they serve a purpose in governing. But the muddying of what Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal and moderate mean have been sloshing and squirting around like Jell-O.

So I've been considering, as both parties re-consider their identities and brands, what is an outcome that benefits the country?

As an independent voter (we call it "unenrolled" in Massachusetts), I see an importance in the balance that a multi-party system brings. Without that balance -- with everyone playing to the ideological middle with no sense of the poles -- I believe America loses its bearings. (I will try to keep my fundamental assumptions to a minimum, but that is one of them). I suspect I am not alone, with a strong tendancy for the American people not to vote unilaterally for one party. This is also borne out in the observation that the Democratic landslide in November has been coupled with many stern warnings from the people (from ordinary citizens to pundits) not to swing as far left as we had swung far right.

It used to be that Republican included: fiscally conservative, small government, constitutionalist, entrepreneurial, analytical and dispassionately smart. Yet in the last eight years, all of these planks of the platform have been shattered. What remains includes a corrosive social conservatism that is better at generating hate and mistrust than at generating real solutions to serious problems.

Democrats on the other hand used to stand for: fiscally liberal, big government, progressive constitutional interpretation, labor-friendly, emotional and passionate. Clearly the Democrats have done a better job recently in growing their base of support, but they have done so by promising to return to several tenets that Republicans claimed as their own. Simply by ousting George W. Bush and hitting the reset button on his policies and governing approaches -- from the powers of the presidency (and vice-presidency) to more amiable foreign relations to fiscal responsibility to intelligent and open discourse around big decisions -- has done a lot to establish the Democrats as the party of the majority. It has also blurred the lines distinguishing the parties. And in so doing, it has made it less clear -- to me, at least -- how a two-party system makes our democracy better. Two parties trying to look the same will limit choice. Two parties that each hold valuable aspects of the American ethos -- and neither holding them all -- will necessarily need to come together, balance one another and compromise to fulfill all of what Americans will ask of their government.

The Power of the President of the US

I am riveted listening to Mickey Edwards, Director of the Aspen Institute, who is talking on C-SPAN about executive privilege and power. His assertion is that, in order to select the next president, we need to ask the candidates the most important question: what does each believe are the limits of power of the office of president?

He makes the case that , and he blames the news media and the schools for causing us to lose focus of how the Constitution has laid out governmental powers.

He emphasized the criticality of the president's reaching across the aisles to all leaders, especially in a time of gridlock. This made me recall a personal expectation I had for this time in history: that gridlock would be good for our country because it would force this kind of dialogue -- a sharing of power. Instead, President Bush has done with Congress what he has done elsewhere (especially in foreign policy): acted unilaterally.

Bush's unilateral action seems to be reflective of a core cognitive limitation to hold paradoxes in his mind. It is as if he's saying, "All this collaboration and multilateralism is too hard... I'm the decider!"

What a mess.

The Culture of Work

I was in a committee meeting at my daughter's school yesterday. We were talking about the progress of several technology initiatives, and what more could be done to move them along and report status to the school's board of trustees. Four people in the room were business executives; one was a former schoolteacher -- now the IT director for the school.

The IT director had made remarkable progress in implementing the recommendations of the committee, despite being set back by a personal injury. With a small team, many of the initiatives had been completed. Those initiatives had to do with getting infrastructure in place. The only initiative that had fallen behind somewhat was the rollout and training of staff and faculty. So, the group was focused on how to communicate the progress made to date to the board.

An interesting dynamic followed. All of the business-trained committee members were thinking similarly about what needed to be communicated: progress vs. plan, expenditures vs. plan, places where the plan needs to change, indicators of effectiveness of the technology investment. The schoolteacher-turned-IT director seemed to be thinking along different lines. On the one hand, he did a great job of showing what had been done -- what labs had been updated, what new laptops had been purchased, pictures of the new digital music studio, and so forth. But when the discussion got to, "where do we go from here?" things seemed to stall out.

It was clear after a moment that the business executives shared a language and culture of work, despite the fact that none had worked together, as far as I know, and I was new to the group. It was also clear that there was a communication gap between us and the school's IT director regarding how to move things forward.

His thoughts seemed to get stuck in several ways. He had just lost an important staff member (1 of 4), and he wasn't sure how to replace him. He seemed to be overwhelmed by the prospect of training the faculty on all of this technology (the only initiative that was behind schedule). And he seemed not to take hold of the thrice-repeated recommendation about how to summarize his progress to the board (he may have understood, but he was not giving feedback in the meeting confirming his understanding or seeking clarity).

We tabled the discussion for later, when he could have some time to think about it. But the temporary disconnect was palpable. I started thinking about what that disconnect was, where it came from. But it seems like a good example of different cultures of work.

When I say "culture of work", I don't mean the culture of a particular place. I mean the assumptions, values and norms for successful activity in a particular field. The culture of work of the executives in that meeting was predictable: planned/actual, benchmarking, customer feedback. And everyone was thinking about similar techniques, artifacts, and strategies to move forward -- and even to help the IT director break through his feeling of overwhelm.

The temptation in the meeting was to "fix" the IT director -- to get him trained in real-time on the culture of work that the others shared. We all deferred that until a later meeting.

Maybe by then the IT Director will come in having processed the feedback he received and return with a game plan that is consistent with the business executive culture of work. Or maybe we'll find ourselves at the next meeting with an increasing desire to "fix" his thinking or approach.

We'll see.